Culture Wars: Then and Now

I grew up in a secular household, so I never understood where people were coming from with the religious stuff. And things were pretty bad when I was a kid, as far as people throwing Christianity into your face. About as bad as it is now with Islam, although the crusaders of my childhood were generally non-violent.

Tay and I grew up during America’s last culture war, when people felt threatened by *legitimate* social progress and were trying to impose what essentially amounted to conservative Christian values upon others — even though it wasn’t so simple as religious vs. secular or left vs. right.

Al Gore and his wife — believe it or not — were at the forefront of those who wanted to use government censorship to keep subversive, Satanic ideas from working their way into the minds of young people. The Evangelicals were with him, unsurprisingly. But non-churchgoers and the moderately religious were not.

The same sort of media-driven outrage you see now was going on back then, only they were playing up the divide by stoking outrage over traditional “American” (i.e., conservative) values, even though the media back then was almost as left-wing as it is now.

It was about ratings — for the networks, at least. For the average Joe, it was about religion, and for the politicians, it was about political power. Both the Dems and the GOP wanted to secure their share of thr Evangelical vote, which back then was pretty evenly split.

The crusaders ultimately took it too far. People (especially young people) rebelled — hardcore. The concept of America as a judeo-Christian nation slowly began to die, except in the minds of the Evangelicals.

I get the sense that some of the resentment of Trump is actually fear of his Evangelical base. People remember the last culture war and they’re afraid of its return.

(I’m not taking about TDSers — more like guys like Lucas Lynch.)

The problem is that the threat from the Regressive Left is far greater than anything we ever faced from the traditionalists of the 90s.

There is a huge divide in America between Christians and non-Christians. Some of it is from legit extremists on both sides — the Evangelicals who don’t believe there should be a separation between Church and State, and the radical Anti-Theists who hate religion so much that they’re willing to reject all propriety on the basis of “that is what Christians believe”.

But the majority of the divide is once again due to the media — portraying EVERYONE as falling into either of those two categories, which simply isn’t the case.

The mainstream media portrays everyone who identifies as a Christian as a Bible-beating extremist, while the right-wing media (Fox News in particular) pretends that every atheist and agnostic is an anti-theist — which is utterly laughable.